The family wanted to cook out at the lake yesterday. Bit of a last minute decision, but it worked out okay. After I logged off here yesterday I made a run to Sam's Club to pick up a few items. Since I'm not currently drinking beer and wine, I bought a case of soda, which is something I almost never do, except on these holidays when someone else might want one.

For all intents and purposes, soda is not a part of my diet. I have one very occasionally, usually at some fast food joint I pop into for lunch, because there often isn't much alternative. Maybe one a month.

A trip to Sam's is, for those who haven't been there, always a bit of a crap shoot. They always have soda, but they might not have all brands. It's that warehouse shopping experience the Waltons brought to us. We trend toward root beer in our family when we do drink soda, or ginger beer. But they were out.

So I bought a case of Coca Cola. I noticed Sam's is now carrying what goes by the general name of "Mexican Coke" around here. If you aren't from the US, you might not be aware, but most Americans ARE well aware that even our soda pop has degenerating over the past several decades, as Coke has tried, usually unsuccessfully, to wrest market share from a slew of new competitors.

And here, Coke made a decision several years ago to stop using cane sugar and go to the cheaper, ubiquitous, high fructose corn syrup that seems to be in damn near every processed food that exists now. While still sweet enough to be way TOO sweet for me most of the time, the sweetness of corn syrup is subtly different. As in not quite as good, if you liked the Coke we had when we were kids.

Mexican Coke never changed. They still use sugar from sugar cane. They even still use the old Coke bottles,made from glass..... the thick kind, the kind I used to get a few pennies for when I scrounged the roadsides as a kid, looking for some spending money.

It's popular here, since NAFTA opened the border. People who move here from Mexico and points south don't especially like the corn syrup coke in the plastic bottle. And a lot of Anglos who drink soda prefer Mexican Coke, too. The Coke they bottle here isn't quite as good tasting.

Why is that?

Because sugar costs more money than corn syrup, and we were slowly trained to accept the latter, so Coke could lower their break-even cost. That's part of it.

Another part, I think, although I don't have any proof, is that the current formula for Coke in the US evolved over the years through various mass media marketing campaigns, each one aimed at shaving a fraction more market share from competitiors, and generating a fraction more profit. The idea was to change SOMETHING. Run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes, as they used to say.

Some of the changes NOBODY saluted, like the short-lived New Coke that was trotted out in 1985, and which immediately tanked Coke's business. Oops. Other changes, like the introduction of the corn syrup, consumers didn't notice quite as much.

But Mexican Coke lets you compare apples to apples. And the truth is that Coke didn't get better. It just got different. Worse.

Now, soda of any kind is unhealthy if you drink it as a regular part of your diet. The high phosphate content of all fizzy drinks messes up the chemical balance in your body and can, under the right circumstances, cause you to excrete too much calcium, which is not only unhealthy for your bones, but also unhealthy for your muscles, which need calcium to function properly. Skeletal muscle, and heart muscle. Even the smooth muscle in your gut.

Not to mention the sugar and the high acidity, which are bad for your teeth. Not to mention your blood sugar.

So drinking Mexican Coke is not a healthy habit. But....I strongly suspect it's less UNHEALTHY than the US bottled corn syrup version. I can't prove that.

But even if it isn't, at least drinking it doesn't create another piece of plastic to "recycle" into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.